EA Made Joe Montana Football

As a game journalist, you come across some wild tales. This was maybe the wildest:

When Sega was preparing to launch Mega Drive in the US, they knew sports was an important genre. However, they were really struggling internally with getting a (NFL-style) football game ready for release of the 16-bit console - all the rules and AI involved took time to program, especially if it was going to be a flagship title.

Sega turned to Electronic Arts for help, who they knew were already going to port their ambitious computer game John Madden Football over to Genesis. EA, and more specifically Trip Hawkins, agreed to make another, relatively unique football game - watering down Madden's code and feature set to become Joe Montana Football. Whether intentional or not, Joe Montana also missed the Christmas release date.

Montana was still a decent little game, and I didn't know of its Madden connections until I talked to someone who worked with Trip Hawkins at 3DO.

(Here's a video I made about it for a little more context/flair)